Application development has become a major industry worldwide. The industry has grown as the demand for portable phones, has increased. Today, more and more applications are being written at a faster and faster pace as developers try to fill the demand.
One major cost to application developers includes costs associated with staffing of sufficient programmers to provide adequate error and bug checking. Further, when testing code executing on phones, an additional cost includes the cost of purchasing sufficient variety of phone models to ensure Mot free code for most end users. This is a particular problem for developers because of the great plurality of phones and operating system versions that have been released. Designing an application to run on all platforms requires significant error checking. Releasing an application with too many errors often can be disastrous for company. In response to the needs of the developers, many companies offer manual error and bug testing services for application developer companies. These companies hire programmers to apply series of test protocols in order to discover errors or bugs in the application and to report a bug to the developers. While the error testing firms are able to reduce the staffing costs of the application developers, such companies typically charge hourly rates for software testing, so the costs associated with error testing remain high.
In the following description, the use of the same reference numerals in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.